At the Founding of the National Parks

Published: August 27, 2006

Ninety years ago, Woodrow Wilson signed what has come to be called the National Park Service Organic Act, which established the park service within the Department of the Interior. The act is brief -- a series of instructions for the new director -- and its most important phrases come early on. The fundamental purpose of the parks, the act says, ''is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.''

Reading this sentence 90 years later, you cannot help noticing that the word ''enjoyment'' is carefully framed by the words ''conserve'' and ''unimpaired'' -- a reminder that our pleasure in the parks depends on the quality of what we find there. When the first management policies -- the day-to-day rules -- were written in 1918, the director of the park service made the point even more emphatically. The first principle, he said, is that ''the national parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form.''

Since 1916, preserving the natural resources of the national parks has not become any easier. The American population has nearly tripled, and the constant popularity of the parks means that they risk being loved to death. Financing the park service is always a battle, and the maintenance backlog continues to grow. The past few years have been among the hardest in the history of the National Park Service, whose first principle -- preservation -- has been attacked by the very people in the Interior Department who are supposed to uphold it.

That makes it even more clear that the authors of the Organic Act got it exactly right. Only a determined focus on preservation can keep the parks from being eroded until there is almost nothing left to preserve. We set aside these places because they are extraordinary, because they enlarge our idea of nature and ourselves. Year by year our understanding of how to protect the national parks changes because our understanding of nature itself changes. The one thing that must not change is our commitment to the principles signed into law 90 years ago.